Rocking Horse Road (22 page)

After all these years Al Penny still favours the
lone-wolf theory, and in his defence, all of our other
suspicions have turned out to be dead ends. Maybe
Lucy
was
killed by a stranger who crept in from beyond
the borders of the Spit, and just as quickly disappeared
off our map. Or, just maybe, the killer has lived among
us all these years. Him or him or even him.

Mark Murray did come up with something
promising early this year. When scanning the online
editions of overseas papers, he found a small article
from September 2003. It was about a young woman
who had been raped and strangled on a beach in
Cyprus, near the port of Limassol. Her attacker has
never been caught. She was a nineteen-year-old English
tourist from Leeds. The body had been dumped in the
sea. The photograph of her which scrolled down on
Mark's screen showed an English rose — an almost-chubby
redhead. But there were enough similarities to
our case to spark Mark's interest and make him print
everything out and add it to the files (
Exhibit
135).

Limassol is a major sea-port where sailors come
and go on every tide. On a whim, Mark got shipping
manifests for Limassol for the week that the girl was
murdered. They weren't available online and he had
to send away to the Cyprus Ports Authority for hard
copies and pay an administration fee. When the papers
finally turned up in the mail months later, there were
pages and pages of tightly packed names of ships, and
details of dates and weights, all in columns. Hundreds
of ships had come and gone around the time the
girl was murdered. Among them, though, was the
container ship
Gerd Maersk
, owned by the Maersk
shipping company, and registered in Copenhagen.
It had berthed in Limassol three days before the girl
was murdered and left the morning after. There was
nothing strange or suspicious about that in itself and
the fact would have gone unnoticed by most people.
But Mark Murray is a smart cookie: he remembered
that in late 2003, the first mate of the
Gerd Maersk
was
Pete Marshall's big brother, Tony.

It's probably the most random of coincidences
that brought a man from down the Spit, now working
on the other side of the world, close to the scene of
another young woman's waveside strangling. As
we've discovered over the years, theories are made
to be disproved. But as far as theories go, it's an
interesting one.

We've grown good at biding our time. We've got
our bar and our pool table and our files. We can wait
until Tony Marshall berths again in Lyttelton, and
then we'll do another interview.

So who killed Lucy Asher?

Despite the thread of hope that Tony Marshall
offers, we have to conclude that we may never know
for certain. All we do know is that it's impossible for
any of us to remember a time before we found Lucy.
For better or worse our search for her killer, our search
for her, defines us. The case, and everything connected
to it, has become as familiar and real to us as our
own hand, leg or eye. In fact, it is more real, because
it is closer to our core. Certainly, it will be harder to
remove should it turn out in the final reckoning to be,
like poor old Pete's balls, cancerous.

Since Pete's funeral, Jim and Al have stopped
meeting with the rest of us. Tug Gardiner has sold
his parents' house and has moved out to the western
suburbs. He now lives in a new brick and plaster place
in a subdivision of almost identical houses. We helped
him shift the little furniture he chose to keep into a
rented truck, and since then we haven't seen much of
him either. He claims that he doesn't miss the Spit.

Whether any of us can truly put our shared history
behind us for good is questionable. We suspect that
Jim and Al and Tug will be back, given time. Perhaps
they don't really have any choice in the matter. Perhaps
we are like the dolls that Lucy's father launched out
into the Pacific: always sailing at the whim of the tides
and the prevailing winds, course and purpose only an
illusion.

Our files of evidence are bulging and our shelves
sag, but in the early morning hours when we
can't sleep, or during one of those endless Sunday
afternoons when it's overcast and raining outside and
there's nothing on the box, doubts inevitably bubble to
the surface of our minds. As we drive yet again from
our homes to the lock-up, we can't help but wonder if
we're just wasting our time. On the bad days we are
filled with doubt. Then it seems entirely possible to
us that our own lives are adrift — that we have spent
the best years searching, and yet have gone nowhere
that we planned, and know nothing for certain. As the
lights of the lock-up flicker back on, and we move to
relight the candle beneath the photograph of a smiling
Lucy Asher, we sometimes find it hard to hold on to
our faith.